Why My Son Has My Wife's Last Name

While cleaning out a closet this past summer, I came upon a corduroy jacket I hadn't worn in years. It had not held up well. There was a speck of moth damage at the lapel and loose stitching at the shoulder. The arm patches that I'd once found dignified now seemed cheap and pretentious. I tossed the jacket on a pile to take to a charity.

Something about it called out to me, however. I picked up the jacket again and tried it on one last time over a T-shirt. As I did, I felt something in the left breast pocket. There's always a small thrill that comes with discovering an unknown object in an item of clothing you haven't recently worn. Is it an envelope filled with cash? Drugs someone planted there? Tiny women's underpants from the time my wife and I pulled to the side of a Vermont road to have sex?

It was a letter from my father, and it was a barn burner. I instantly recalled its contents, but I helplessly skimmed it again anyway. His hurt and anger leaped from the page. Our handwriting is spookily similar, so it was like reading Mao-style self-criticism. I'd let down the family, he wrote. I'd let him down. What could I have been thinking? I set the letter on a bureau with two hands, as if I'd been handling a hot wok with oven mitts.

My crime was not arson, embezzlement, or pulling for a team other than the Pittsburgh Pirates.

My crime was not arson, embezzlement, or pulling for a team other than the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was this: When our first child, a son, was born, we gave him my wife's surname and not mine.

Pablo Picasso, who used his mother's maiden name.

Getty Images

This was a political decision and also a personal one. Political because it is so clearly a natural extension of a woman's prerogative to keep her own name in marriage. (As the writer Carol Lloyd asked, why does a woman's first matrimonial act have to be "etymological suicide"?) This freedom still seems relatively new. Until the 1970s, some states required women to use their husband's name in order to bank, get a driver's license, even vote. I'm surprised checkbooks weren't burned alongside bras.

These laws constituted an unpleasant reminder that since America's founding, and for many centuries before that in England, a male surname has functioned as a way of assessing property—women very much included. Silvia Fendi, the creative director of men's wear and accessories for the company that bears her surname, told The New York Times last year that her family had to petition Italy's president for permission to hand down its matrilineal name. "In my family, being a woman is a plus," she said. "So I am a Fendi. I heard they're going to vote for this law that permits women to give their name to children. I hope so." Ms. Fendi, like all my favorite women, is a shit-kicker.

It was a personal decision because my wife's family name, LeFavour, was dying out. While I have a brother who has two sons, she and her sister were the last of an old line, one that stretches back to colonial times; her ancestors fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars. We debated giving our children, Penn and Harriet, one of those double-barreled, hinged-at-the-middle last names: Garner-LeFavour. But it sounded ungainly, affected, and like the name of a forgotten Canadian trade bill.

At the time, our decision didn't feel like an act of defiance or cultural daring. It felt like us. We were young and living in a tiny (600-square-foot) apartment on Jane Street in Manhattan's West Village when we had our children. I was tenuously employed at an online magazine; Cree, my wife, was in grad school. We were struggling. But we knew we wanted to live our own lives and not anyone else's. I had zero male panic over not passing on my name along with my genes. I felt no need to stamp my children, as if with a tattoo. They know who they are. Still, we didn't know anyone else who'd given their kids a matrilineal surname. But then a friend told me about the writer Jon Katz, who'd done so many years before. Out of the blue, I called him. He was a mensch. (Buy his perceptive books about dogs.) Katz told me it was the best decision he'd ever made.

I expected some mild blowback from my family. I didn't expect my father to so fully scramble the kin-network jets. Before long, aunts, cousins, and siblings were reaching out to tell me, via letters intended to land like drone strikes, that I was maligning the extended Garner clan. I explained to everyone what I was doing and why. I told them they were overreacting. I told them they would get over it, which they did long ago. My relationship with my father has more than recovered. A second blast came from male friends, some of whose wives had taken their last name. These guys shifted uneasily when I told them about it and (in my mind, at any rate) subtly checked that their testicles were still in place. Wasn't I worried, they asked, that strangers might think I was a stepfather? I looked at them and pronounced: Yes, amigos, I am more confident in my masculinity than thou.

There aren't many statistics about this sort of thing. The most recent surveys show that about 20 percent of women keep their surname in marriage. The number of women who pass along their name to their children is surely considerably lower, but I expect it to rise.

I felt no need to stamp my children, as if with a tattoo.

Elsewhere, it's not an unheard-of cultural practice. In Sweden, where the surnames too often sound alike, couples frequently rummage through their family's past for a new and sometimes matrilineal one. In Spain, both parents' surnames are passed on to children, and occasionally the woman's is the one that sticks. (Pablo Picasso took his mother's name.) But the practice is still exceedingly rare in America, and why it should be so is baffling to me.

My wife and I will never divorce. I can say this with certainty not only because I adore her but also because when we got married, we made a pact: If one of us leaves, he or she forfeits all their books to the other. There is no way I am leaving my books. Along with my children and my marriage, my library is the work of my life. I stand with Flaubert, who wrote, "Me and my books in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar." Divorce is certainly worth mentioning when it comes to surnames, given that after a divorce, women tend to gain custody of the children, who often carry the surname of a man they despise.

Let me end by citing the nastiest repercussion of our decision to give our children Cree's last name: nothing. My kids have not once been made to feel unusual or uncomfortable, and when the topic comes up, they explain the thinking behind their surname with evident pride. There's only one rule for raising great kids, and Calvin Trillin laid it out: "Your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary."

Illustration by Ben Goldstein/Studio D

This article originally appeared in the December/January '17 issue of Esquire.

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